


Cutting For Stone

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Best Friends, Canon Related, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Male Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:12:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After "Extreme Measures", Julian has some reconciling to do with himself. Miles has been there before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cutting For Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lunabee34 (Lorraine)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/gifts).



Julian is waiting by the bar again with the far-away expression that Miles has come to equate with deep thoughts and a spiraling depression that threatens to get out of hand if he doesn’t intervene. His drink is barely touched, the once-warm toddy that he drinks at night before falling asleep after a long shift. The situation looks bleak, Miles thinks as he approaches him on quiet footfalls that Julian hears all the same.

“I wondered if you might come,” he begins to say without even turning himself toward Miles, but at least he takes a drink of the lukewarm toddy to seem normal. A spot of color reaches his face, and Miles resists the urge to shake him to return the rest of his color to him. “You should be home with Keiko.”

Miles scoffs and takes the seat next to him, his face darkened in the same exasperated way that seems to be saved for Julian alone. His voice is soft when he finally responds, after Quark drops a synthale in front of him. “You knew I’d come,” he mutters to him quietly, less an accusation and more a confirmation of what the two of them already knew. “You knew I wouldn’t leave you alone after all that.”

 _All that_ , Miles thinks bitterly, is the death of a madman overseeing the secret underbelly of the Federation; the cracks in the perfect veneer that no one but Julian had been allowed to see. And then Miles, if only by association; if only because Julian is his best friend and Miles can't leave him to his own mind any more than he could have left him to Sloan’s.

“No,” Julian agrees, sounding faintly surprised. “You’re right, I knew.”

“Too smart for your own good,” Miles growls at him and lifts his glass of synthale for a drink.

Whiskey and synthale can never smooth over the parts of him that aren’t comfortable with the things he’s had to do in his life and the man that those things have made him into, but he already knows that, though he’d certainly tried after Setlik III. It had been those memories of the creeping specter of dark disappointment for failing to live up to his own expectations that had been replaying in his head while lying next to Keiko before he told her everything about the day. When she finished admonishing him for that kind of risky, careless behavior, the kind that could get him killed, she had kissed him until he was breathless and then kicked him out of bed with firm instructions not to come back until he was sure Julian was well.

‘Miles,’ she had whispered to him, resting her hand on his arm while he sputtered indignantly about leaving her there, ‘if you know what he’s going through, you can’t let him fight that alone, can you?’

And she was right. Keiko is always right.

Julian frowns at his hands like they’re stained and then lifts his glass with a disgusted sound before declaring, “I can’t believe myself. What I let myself do.”

“You’re thinking you’re not any better than Sloan,” Miles adds for him. He knows this feeling. He’s been there.

“It’s worse than that,” Julian says hastily, sputtering over his toddy. “I mean—yes, it’s that, but it’s more. It’s that I was better than him, I _knew_ I was better, but when I was desperate enough, I found that I was willing to do _anything_ , up to and including torture and murder, to accomplish what I needed, even if it was for the best.” His voice dies slowly, then he sighs and smiles bitterly.

“Yes,” he concludes softly. “It’s that I’m not any better than Sloan, and he knew that about me. It sounds so terrible when I say it.”

“Not really,” Miles murmurs just under the hum of the crowd, so Julian will have to strain to hear him. “Anyway, you forgot conspiracy and abduction in that list of things that violate your Hippocratic Oath and the Starfleet Code of Conduct and all the other moral codes you keep yourself to.”

Julian winces and pulls away. “That’s not really funny, Miles.”

“No, it’s not,” Miles agrees and leans closer to him, unwilling to let Julian pull away and deal with this on his own. “Do you remember what you told me after I got back from that planet that I served that unholy prison sentence on? About how losing my humanity for a moment didn’t ruin my whole life, or whatever it was you said to me.”

“I remember, yes.” Julian’s tone is suspicious, but he doesn’t pull away again and he’s obviously interested with the parallel Miles is drawing here. “But this isn’t quite the same as that, you know.”

Miles gently pushes the toddy away from Julian and nudges the rest of his synthale toward the far side of the bar. “Let me finish! Good God, it’s amazing anyone gets a word in edgewise with you. What I want to say is that—look, I’ve talked about Setlik III with you before.”

Something close to understanding begins to dawn in Julian’s eyes, though he lowers them back toward his hands, only occasionally looking up at Miles. “You’ve told me a lot about it, yeah.”

“Then you know that Ee’char wasn’t a one-off sort of thing when it comes to dealing with my own,” Miles pauses there and tries to choose his words very carefully, holding Julian’s gaze when he looks up from their hands again. “My own potential for brutality, let’s say.”

Julian wilts visibly, slouching further on his stool and rubbing fingertips into his forehead. “I could have come up with a better way of doing this. What’s the point in being so bloody brilliant if I can’t come up with a better way of doing things, of saving the people I need to save without stooping to his level?”

“You haven’t lost yourself because of this,” Miles continues and sets a hand on Julian’s arm, which the younger doesn’t shrug off or resist. “You feel like it now, but you didn’t have to give up anything of yourself to save Odo. You haven’t.”

“A man is dead, Miles!”

“And so are all the Cardassians I fought and killed back in the wars,” he retorts immediately, and the shock of it stuns Julian into momentary, miraculous silence. “You couldn’t have saved Sloan and Odo both, your notions of all-powerful doctors aside.”

Julian works his mouth silently for a moment before snapping it closed and grabbing his toddy back.

“That feeling won’t go away just yet,” Miles continues quietly, but Julian’s eyes flicker toward him while he takes a drink, so he knows that his friend is at least listening to him. “The one that makes you want to put your sonic shower on a higher frequency and stand under it until you feel clean. It’ll stick with you for a while, but it goes away. You get better at living with it and figuring out where that part of you fits in with the rest.”

“It’s uncanny sometimes, Miles,” Julian says after a long pause punctuated by a roaring laugh from Morn’s table that seems light years from their conversation. “How well you can figure me out and say the right thing at just the right time.” He finishes the toddy, pushes it back across the bar so the cup sits neatly next to Miles’s, and rises to his feet.

Miles stands with him, leaving his synthale on the bar. “You’re smarter than I am, Julian, but I’ve been where you are. I can’t leave you there to stagger your way through it. And Keiko wasn’t going to let me burn a hole in our ceiling thinking about how miserable you looked during dinner tonight.”

“Ah,” Julian says with a warm smile that reaches his eyes, clasping Miles’s elbow. “The lovely Keiko and her insights. I suppose that’s to be expected, but she didn’t tell you just what to say, did she?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Miles sighs and claps him on the shoulder, pulling him away from the bar and back out toward the Promenade. “She trusts me to say the right thing sometimes, when there’s someone I like enough in question.”

Julian’s eyes light with the memory of their conversation deep in the recesses of Sloan’s mind, the echo of sentiment that Miles had only been on the verge of vocalizing before it had been cut short. “She’s a hell of a woman,” he offers instead of any of the other things Miles thinks are choking their way out of him.

“And you’re a hell of a good man, Julian,” Miles reminds him as seriously as he can, even with the smile creeping into the creases of his eyes. “Now go to bed, man. It’s nearly 0100.”

They walk together, but when they part ways in the long, curving corridors of the habitat ring, Julian lingers a moment longer than seems necessary.

“Kiss your wife for me, for sparing you in the middle of the night for my sake,” Julian instructs slowly with a faint smile edging toward the safety of teasing.

Miles prefers it this way, where they both recognize the depth and breadth of the other’s emotions but neither of them have to ever quite acknowledge them. Tonight seems a little different than the usual collection of feelings to deal with, so Miles catches Julian’s shoulder before he turns away completely, and pulls him in for a warm hug that Julian hesitates before returning. His hands aren’t clasping or desperate, but the long breath he pushes out into Miles’s shoulder says more about his need than any other kind of gesture of fragility ever could.

So Miles holds him tighter, and doesn’t let go.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cutting for Stone (The Mason's Ballad)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1566137) by [templemarker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/templemarker/pseuds/templemarker)




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